There is a definite problem with the aggregate sites in that they reduce everything to straight ups and downs and don’t bother with the guts. Used to be you’d read or see one or more reviews and you’d get to the WHY and you could filter their why through your taste, if what the reviewer complained about wasn’t stuff that bothered you you might decide to see it anyway.
The other problem with the aggregates is there’s an assumed math there that doesn’t really apply, a 70% positive movie isn’t necessarily better than a 60% or worse than an 80%, they just appealed to a different percentage of the reviewers. You can really see that when it comes to mid-budget and arthouse movies, they tend to not be reviewed by as many people, thus their math gets more prone to clustering, 70% of 50 reviewers isn’t the same as 70% of 100 reviewers.
Of course when you get right down to it the biggest problem is the beat book. They need to stop following that like a religion, it’s what makes all their movies feel the same. Move the meet cute 5 minutes later once in a while guys, really, you can do it.
One of the things that made Roger Ebert such a good reviewer at his peak (not talking about his later years when he seemed to like everything and let his personal politics cloud his writing) was that he would measure a movie essentially against what it was trying to be. Lethal Weapon and Ordinary People weren’t trying the same things so pretending that 3.5 star ratings for them meant the same thing was silly.
I expect very different experiences from a Paul Thomas Anderson movie to a Marvel Universe movie. So, just an aggregate of 81 percent doesn’t mean all that much.
One of the things that made Roger Ebert such a good reviewer at his peak (not talking about his later years when he seemed to like everything and let his personal politics cloud his writing) was that he would measure a movie essentially against what it was trying to be. Lethal Weapon and Ordinary People weren’t trying the same things so pretending that 3.5 star ratings for them meant the same thing was silly.
I expect very different experiences from a Paul Thomas Anderson movie to a Marvel Universe movie. So, just an aggregate of 81 percent doesn’t mean all that much.